Way too many employees are putting highly sensitive data at risk

Protecting the security and integrity of data has become one of the bigger challenges for most companies nowadays, but unfortunately, employees don’t seem to be sharing the same sentiment, as data management practices for many of them are anything but secure.

A report from Western Digital based on a poll of 737 data managers, and 1,467 data users across the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, found almost 25% of employees think they might have put highly sensitive data at risk in the past 12 months.

That being said, it is no wonder that the majority of data managers (68%) believe employee behavior is a bigger threat to the security of their highly sensitive data, than external hackers and various malicious actors.

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Furthermore, less than two in five (37%) of data users utilize HDDs and SSDs for sharing data. Instead, most will use email to share files. In fact, email is the second most popular method of data sharing, despite the fact that just 13% of data managers recommend it, or think it’s secure to use.

Things have only gotten more difficult since Covid-19, remote working, and hybrid working setups. A third of data managers (35%) think employees lack the tools and the technology to safeguard their data from home, while 33% feel “psychologically more ‘removed’ from risks” when working remotely.

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Cloud technologies are now “commonly” used to share and store data, Western Digital also added, saying that almost all (87%) of the respondents think cloud data breaches and leaks grew into a “significant” or “moderate” problem.

Despite all these, data managers have a solution, the report concludes. More than half (54%) plan to use HDDs or SDDs more in the next two years, while three-quarters (76%) see HDDs and SSDs with encryption or security features as a great way to address many of the concerns regarding data security.

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